Xueling Chen Wins the First Pull&Bear Fashion Photography Prize at Hyères

Xueling Chen has been named the winner of the inaugural Pull&Bear Fashion Photography Prize at the 41st Hyères Festival . The awards ceremony took place last Saturday at Villa Noailles, where winners across the fashion, photography, and accessories categories were announced. Born in China in 1995, Chen takes the prize as the brand begins its role as a principal partner of the festival.

Chen is a visual artist and photographer working between Europe and China. She trained as a freelance fashion photographer in Shanghai before earning a master’s degree in Fashion Image from Central Saint Martins, and her practice brings personal narrative together with an exploration of space. Through photography, she moves between the intimate and the collective, addressing themes such as urban nomadism, female identity, and the emotional imprint of places.

Since 2017, Chen has built a distinct visual language attuned to the idea of dérive, emotional memory, and the everyday connections formed among young people in cities. Her images often come from self-observation, capturing fleeting states through direct flash, saturated colours, and a texture reminiscent of analog film grain. She works primarily with CCD-sensor cameras, a deliberate choice to move away from standard professional equipment, creating tactile images that sit between the digital and the analog. Her practice also spans digital art, installation, and electronic music.

The award was set up to find and support a new generation of artists whose work engages with the visual codes of fashion, looking beyond the festival itself and into an artist’s professional future. The winner receives €20,000, develops a photographic project for Pull&Bear , and presents a solo exhibition at Villa Noailles during the next edition, alongside a fanzine, a limited-edition T-shirt in the “Pull&Bear × The Photographer Project” series, and an international campaign across the brand’s channels.

For Pull&Bear, the prize continues a broader cultural push that began with its support for the British Fashion Council’s NEWGEN programme and has since extended into other areas, including the Hyères Festival and a recent partnership with Offprint, the Paris-based platform supported by LUMA Arles. Through the prize, the brand keeps a conversation going between design, photography, and publishing, and between fashion and contemporary culture more widely.